With the continued popularity of the Dungeon Finder, many players have been asking for a way to group up with real-life friends who play on other realms to take on instances together. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about a new feature currently in development that will allow players to invite Real ID friends of the same faction to a party regardless of the realm they play on, and then queue up for a 5-player regular or Heroic dungeon.

As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don’t have a release date to share quite yet. It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service. We'll have more details to share with you as development progresses -- in the meantime, you may begin to see elements of the feature appear on the World of Warcraft PTR.

There are a lot of things I will fault Blizzard for but charging people money for a service is not one of them. You have to pay for things you want. I know this idea might seem odd to the people that thing everything should be free (music, movies etc.) but that is not how the world works.

Thats not the point. We already pay a ton of money just to play the game. Its obscene that they're charging money for an ingame feature like crossrealm DF. It should be inclusive. HoN just makes you pay once and absolutely everything that comes out later is free. Blizzard is just being greedy.

nice idea, but who would really pay a monthly fee for this? I know there have been many "tinfoil hat" suggestions that wow is moving more and more into the micro transaction realm, and this one kind of stinks.

I understand why faction/server transfer or race change are premium features (and personally, I think they should be more expensive than they are today to avoid players changing race back 'n fort every new patch). But to pay to be able to fully utilize the realID?!? That's really lame.

I can totally see it now: "Next patch, players will be allowed to send Bound to Battle.net items to their characters in any server. However, this will be a premium feature because we love money and nobody is buying our flying monkey mount"

This pisses me off, but i'm still laughing at all the people who "quit" saying WoW is going to lose more subs this way.
If you quit, why are you here? Oh yeah you either didn't quit or you still have WoW on your mind. which is almost the same as playing it.